Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the time of his first appearance in 1967 the Corto Maltese comics marked a turning point in the world of comics : the complexity of its protagonist and the subtlety of the plot were revolutionary. They were indeed “literary” comics : its author Hugo Pratt declared he was aiming to create “letteratura disegnata” – drawn literature. Corto Maltese was at first published in comic-magazines for children like Corriere dei Piccoli, then it moved to a new type of magazine that was more adult-oriented and had intellectual ambitions, like Linus. Finally Una ballata del mare salato, Corto Maltese’s first adventure, was re-published in 1972 in book form by Mondadori, a major publishing house. Corto Maltese’s literary qualities and its publication history are two innovative aspects of these comics, which elevate them from the status of “popular literature” to achieve “cultural” acknowledgement. At the same time, Hugo Pratt was a great consumer of “popular” fiction, comics and adventure/action movies, which he used as sources of inspiration for his comics. He was a fierce defender of the “popular” origins of his work and refused to call himself an “artist”. This essay investigates these two apparently opposed aspects of the Corto Maltese comics. I will argue that Hugo Pratt aimed to overcome the “cultural” gap between the genres and the different media and to demolish the wall between “high” and “popular” culture.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".